President Obama’s critics like to
say he’s anti-business, and that he doesn’t understand, nor even
like, the military. He is a Democrat, after all, so how could he?

Well, we can say that’s fundamentally
not true with only two words: Blackwater Worldwide.

If Blackwater, the private security
services company now known as Xe Services, which has been one of the
biggest recipients of U.S. taxpayer money flowing through the private
armed security industry since 9/11, is a metaphor for Obama’s handling
of greed, guns and cash flow to war contractors, then we can say neither
the military nor business has much to complain about.

Apparently, Obama never intended to
equate “unaccountable” with “Blackwater” nor any of its myriad
manifestations. That’s evident in the number of contracts — covert
and otherwise — they’ve received since Obama became president.

As for any old feelings he might have
had against relying on contractors to fight overseas, it seems the military
has well convinced Obama otherwise. Turns out that he, like his predecessor,
would rather make Faustian bargains with the war profiteers than admit
the military is too stretched to fight our interventions alone. The
president’s even upped the ante: spreading the already strained military
to 120
different countries across the globe,
no doubt with the help of private security, training, systems support,
and “intelligence services.”

Not surprisingly, the number of private
contractors remains strong under this administration — 174,000 DoD contractors
(.pdf) in the U.S. Central
Command area of operations as of May (including Iraq and Afghanistan),
compared to 214,000 uniformed personnel in the region. This also
includes more than 28,000 armed guards, according to members of congress who just authored a clearly
idealistic bill to stop
the practice of outsourcing in the war zone altogether.

These totals do not include the private
guards used by the State Department in both countries. The numbers in
that case, are supposed to go up dramatically as Foggy Bottom is now
spending $3 billion to build a force
of 5,100 hired guns to
protect its interests in Iraq.

All this under Obama, who once warned
against privatizing war without the proper controls, and is accused,
quite ironically, for pursuing anti-business, “socialistic”
policies that are destroying America’s free market ideals.

Meanwhile, he’s been rewarding the
bad behavior he once railed against, plain and simple. Example:
according
to a report released in February,
the Pentagon paid out over $285 billion to hundreds of contractors who had
been convicted of, fined for, or settled out a charge of defrauding the
government relating to DoD contracts from 2007-2009.
That’s just two years out of a 10-year, unending war.

Blackwater has successfully tested
these very limits. Its own lapses include killing civilians, fraud, peddling
illegal weapons, and ignoring federal laws.
Last year the company had to pay millions in fines for breaking the
law. But thanks to the State Department and the Pentagon, Blackwater/Xe
has continued to draw millions in lucrative security, intelligence and
other contracts ever since.

Erik Prince

The latest evidence of this was reported via press release by USTC Holdings, LCC on Aug. 17. USTC Holdings
is an investor consortium with ties to Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
The group bought Xe, with its 30
subsidiaries and affiliates,
from Prince late last year, and now operates, among everything else,
the massive U.S. Training Center Inc., once known as the Blackwater Lodge
and Training Center located in North Carolina. Former Blackwater operatives
and officials still populate the North Carolina facility and the entire
Xe universe, according to reports.

According to the press release and
a subsequent report by
CNN, the training center
was awarded a $17.6 million contract from the Department of Defense
to provide “all-source intelligence analyst support” in “public
and restricted domains” to U.S. and coalition forces involved in
fighting the Afghan drug war.

“Not only does this specific Department
of Defense contract focus on combining intelligence skills with criminal
investigative abilities, but it also allows the company to create products
that can help detect narcoterrorist activities,” exhorted CNN executive
producer Suzanne Kelly.

In other words, spies, in places our
forces and presumably the military or CIA cannot go. While Blackwater/Xe
has been in Afghanistan from the start, and has worked on counter-narcotics
contracts in Afghanistan before, they’re not exactly known for their
“criminal investigative abilities” leading one source to suggest
that USTC has been hired as a “bucket shop” to hire move warm bodies
into the right places for the DoD.

Not bad for a company whose reputation
has made it synonymous with post- 9/11 war profiteering and corruption.
If the last year for the reanimated Blackwater is any indication, the
free market for mercenaries and hired spooks is quite safe, so Obama
should get credit where it is due.

In addition, two former employees who filed a whistle-blower
lawsuit against Blackwater
alleging that the company overbilled the government more than $123 million
on its $1 billion contract to provide security to Iraq and Afghanistan,
are now heading to court in Virginia.

Blackwater’s dark reputation, including
accusations over the last decade of swaggering arrogance, intimidating
the local population, shooting first and asking questions later — even
cocaine and steroid use among the guards in Iraq — led to a ban from the Iraqi government in 2009, a name change the same year and the eventual flight of Erik Prince to his current home and base
of operations in the United Arab Emirates in August 2010.

But it’s nearly September 2011, and
the sons of Blackwater are still striving, thriving and beating out
the competition.

After the ban in Iraq — a clear signal
that Blackwater was probably radioactive in Muslim countries with which
the U.S. is supposed to be cooperating, Xe was awarded a $120 million contract to provide security services to diplomats
in Afghanistan.

That was announced in June 2010. The
same month, The
Washington Post reported
that the CIA had hired Xe for $100 million to guard its facilities “in
Afghanistan and elsewhere,” leaving security big shots Triple Canopy
and Dyncorp on the losing end of the bid competition.

In October 2010, Spencer Ackerman at
Wired’s Danger Room reported that “International Development Solutions
IDS,” USTC’s “joint venture with Kaseman,” another defense contracting outfit, had
won a piece of a new five-year Worldwide Personal Protective Services
contract issued by the State Department and worth up to $10 billion.
One guesses the
audit in 2009 declaring
that Blackwater owed the State Department $55 million in overpayments
because the company hadn’t fulfilled its requirements in the old WPPS
contract, had already been forgiven.

“Apparently, there is no misdeed
so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government.
And this is despite a 2008
campaign pledge from Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts,”
wrote Ackerman at the time.

Apparently so. Xe was finally sold
to USTC Holdings in December 2010. Empowered by the fig leaf that distanced
them from Prince, who had already moved to Abu Dhabi, USTC Holdings’
officials boasted to Ackerman in January that it had already acquired
an $84 million deal to protect the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. Ackerman
headlined his piece simply, “Despite Denials, Blackwater Still Works
for the U.S.”

In March, the State Department quietly
tussled with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over a directive he had issued
banning all commercial security contractors from the country. According
to The
Guardian, Blackwater/Xe
was eventually put on a list of contractors who could stay for another
year, at least.

According to a list seen by
The Guardian, 11 companies operating in Afghanistan that have a good reputation with government
officials will enjoy favored status in taking over contracts.

Xe Services, formerly known
as Blackwater, is included in that group despite being banned in Iraq
and notorious for its activities in Afghanistan.

In May, a lineup of former military intelligence
and Blackwater operatives calling themselves Jellyfish, stood positioned to break into the lucrative
private-sector intelligence business. Tapping into their combined international
surveillance and covert ops skills to provide “a worldwide intelligence
network of contacts, ready to collect data on global hot spots that
Jellyfish can pitch to deep-pocketed clients,” Jellyfish’s reps
said they were not ashamed about their Blackwater ties.

In fact they seem to be banking on them,
telling reporters at the May launch that Jellyfish will train in network
security, as well as “physical security.”

They’re not the only ones unafraid
of the Blackwater taint (if there even is one). Also in May, former
Bush administration Attorney
General John Ashcroft (you
know, the one who asked for, and got, all of the enhanced law enforcement
and surveillance measures otherwise known as the PATRIOT Act passed
through congress within days after the 9/11 terror attacks) signed on
as an “independent director” for Xe Services, heading its new “subcommittee
on governance,” to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability.”

So it all begins — and ends — with
a company’s surrogacy in Washington. Blackwater, now Xe, has always
had the best, thanks to Prince’s
family foothold in Republican politics — Christian conservative politics to be exact. It’s bought Blackwater
not only the contracts it desired, but time, and seeming absolution.
Else you wouldn’t hear someone like Ashcroft saying this about his new
affiliation: “This is a company with a strong
history of service to its country, and a reputation of best-in-class
offerings to its public and private customers.”

We can hear Prince laughing all the
way from Abu Dhabi. For someone who the papers suggested was fleeing
in disgrace, he’s doing pretty well for himself there, too. According
to The
New York Times, Prince
is behind a $529 million deal to put together a private army for Sheik
Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. The 51 percent-UAE
Emirati company that’s reportedly running the show, Reflex Responses,
insists that Prince has nothing to do with the nascent mercenary force,
nor the company itself, but at least five sources, including former
employees, confirmed that the Prince, a former Navy SEAL, is driving
it.

According to NYT’s May report,
Prince is already putting together the 800-man army of mostly foreign commandos from places like Colombia and South Africa, and has hired
his old buddies and former weapons and Special Operation specialists
from all over the spectrum like the lead in some steroidal Arnold Schwarzenegger
film.

Oh, and Prince refuses to hire Muslims
for the fighting, says NYT, warning that Muslims can’t be
counted on to kill other Muslims. Only faceless, nameless sellswords
can be counted on to kill Muslims — if that is what they are being
paid to do.

And that brings us back to the beginning,
back to losing hearts and minds with unaccountable contractors. Take
a look at any poll, in any place we’ve touched, or anywhere in the
Arab world — approval
numbers for the U.S. have plummeted
since Obama took office in 2008 — and it will tell you a story.

No matter, if there was ever a leaner,
hungrier example of the unaccountable free market in action it is the
private business of war, with Erik Prince one of the most successful
of all independent procurers. And Obama one serious Sugar Daddy.

See, this Democrat is not so bad for
business after all. Isn’t that what really matters?

Obama only hates private businesses that aren't beholden to the federal govt. Without its DC contracts, Blackwater/Xe wouldn't exist.

And Obama has been a godsend for the Pentagon as well. High unemployment isn't a bug of Obamanomics — it's a feature, and an intentional one. Who needs the real draft when you have the "depression draft" that forces young adults to enlist and prevents current troops from leaving? That's why Army recruiters no longer need to lie, threaten or falsify documents, and why "stop loss" is no longer an issue. It's also why DADT was repealed when it was. Had that happened in a decent economy, the resulting mass exodus would have presented the govt. with the Hobson's choice of abandoning its wars or reviving conscription. Ditto the recent talk of gutting the military retirement system (and not grandfathering those already serving).

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.